﻿Vote green ﻿andy brown

Whisper it but not all Academies are the spawn of the devil. Some of them are very well run local schools. It is also the case that not all Academy chains are run by evil capitalists or religious fanatics. The Co-op sponsors some very responsibly run academies. Several genuine charities also sponsor academies working in some very deprived communities and are doing an excellent job.But .... however .... yet ...The challenge the government faces is not to explain to the public that some academies are actually quite good. The challenge is to explain the following:1. What makes them think that academies are always better than local authority schools?2. Why does a change in governance structure make any difference to performance?3. Are all local authorities automatically incapable of setting up effective networks of schools?4. Does that include Conservative run local authorities?5. If it does why hasn't the Conservative party challenged its own party members to do a better job with their local control?6. Is it possible for an academy to be badly run?7. Does every little Primary School in the country have the capacity to be self governing?8. Without the right to any parent governors how will local parents exercise any control over a badly run academy?9. How much time will primary school Head Teachers spend on preparing to turn their school into an academy?10. Could that time have been spent more usefully e.g. on improving educational performance?11. Why is a national chain of academies automatically better than an elected local education authority?12. How will a national chain of academies know what local parents want?13. How does a local authority provide a school place for every child if local schools are controlled by a variety of different national academy chains?14. How will local parents find out whether a national chain of academies is helping or hindering the local teachers to improve their child's education?15. How can the general public get rid of an ineffective academy chain?16. By what mechanism will a national chain of academies find out quickly and reliably whether an individual local Head Teacher is ineffective?17. Why do so many leaders of academy chains need to award themselves such large salaries?18. How are payments to academy chain leaders to be monitored and controlled by taxpayers?

19. How will central government be able to find out quickly and reliably which academy chains are effective when the chain has an incentive to hide bad news?20. How many members of the public know what a school commissioner is and what they do for their large salaries?21. How many members of the public know who to complain to about an ineffective academy chain that is damaging their child's education?22. Why are local electors considered incapable of forming a reliable opinion about the quality of their child's education yet capable of electing an MP?23. Why is central government promising to devolve increased amounts of central government spending to local mayors if they don't trust local government to oversee the education system?24. What control will local people have over the disposal of land used by the local school but owned by a national academy chain?25. How much will it cost to get back the land they have given away from the chains of academies that now own that land?26. How many small local schools will be closed by academy chains that have decided that they are 'uneconomic'? Who will pay the extra travel costs?27. Why is central government creating increased numbers of separate faith 'free' schools when integration has never been more important for social cohesion?28. How will central government know what is taught to a child in a separate 'faith' school between rare inspection visits?29. Whatever happened to the Conservative Party's opposition to pointless top down re-organisations?30. Whatever happened to the Conservative Party's opposition to bureaucratic change instead of focusing on school improvement?These are just some of the questions that have not been properly answered by Nicky Morgan. But the real killer question is the very last one.If local parents want their school to remain in local authority control then why is the state denying them that choice?​

​Predicting the future is a mug's game. So here goes!I think there is a real possibility that there will be another General Election within the next 12 months. Why? Because of the logic of what might reasonably be expected to happen to the Conservatives after the EU vote.Start by assuming that the British people vote sensibly and rationally and select the best prospect for the UK economy, UK jobs, workers rights, women's rights, security and the environment. Which would be to stay in. Then ask yourself what happens in the couple of weeks after a defeat for the out camp.Can those who campaigned to get out shrug their shoulders, accept that they have lost, and go back to business as usual? The Cameron camp will want to get on with ruling with as little trouble from the dissident right as possible. Their patience with dissidents will not be high. By contrast a great many of those who campaigned to leave will not be at all keen to shut up and accept that they have been beaten, particularly if the vote is close. Remember that in Scotland the vote to remain in won hands down but the SNP emerged massively strengthened.If you have spent weeks campaigning to get out you don't just stop. If you have been beaten by a team led by your own party leader you won't be happy. If you sincerely believe that they only way to save the world is to pursue the radical right tea party agenda and this noble cause has just been betrayed what do you do next? Do you shut up and go away to lick your wounds? Or do you get very angry indeed. Cross enough to vote against your leader on many issues. Cross enough to try to force a leadership election to bring him down. Cross enough perhaps to decide that if you don't like the new leader there is no option left other than to split off and form your own faction that fights for what you really believe.In such circumstances there is every chance of the government losing a motion of confidence in the House of Commons. If the economy runs into any kind of difficulties this becomes even more likely. If the scale of the cuts and the chaos generated by its endless top down, ill thought out, re-organisations of public services makes the government unpopular then the same thing happens. I therefore think a vote to stay in is highly likely to result in a split in the Conservative Party that is bad enough for them to lose the narrow majority that they currently hold.Now imagine that the vote to leave goes the other way. Will those who have campaigned so hard to get us out be happy to quietly put themselves under the wise leadership of those who have just lost a campaign to keep us in? If Cameron loses the vote then surely an early departure and a serious leadership campaign from the radical right becomes inevitable. Can the faction of the Conservatives which is most interested in conserving a friendly environment for business cope with quietly following the lead of a radical right that is taking their country into an economic disaster that will wreck their business interests? We have already seen significant numbers of old fashioned one nation Conservatives lining up to rebel against a series of highly unpleasant decisions by the current government such as cuts to disability payments. Will that faction be able to remain in a Conservative party fashioned in the image of Rees Mogg? Will they continually vote for every measure a new even more extremely right wing leader, drunk on the power of an exit victory, comes up with?Logic says that there are incompatibilities in the Conservative Party which are going to be extraordinarily difficult to contain whichever way the exit vote goes. That is why I think it is more than likely that the EU vote will result in a crisis in the party and that such a crisis might easily result in a decision, either forced or voluntary, to go back to the electorate and fight a fresh General Election.I therefore suggest that any party that has the remotest interest in helping to defeat the Conservatives at the next election needs to get ready. And that leads to my next bit of crystal ball gazing. I predict that none of the other political parties will be sufficiently well organised, united and clear in their proposals to take full advantage of the opportunity.I suggest we all start looking hard and long at the practical policies we intend to put before the electors. The UK is in the middle of a very important ideological battle where the public is yet to be convinced that any politician can be trusted to take us forward. After the debacle of the 2008 economic failure of extreme free market policies and the lies about increasing UK security by getting involved in bad wars they have become deeply angry and deeply cynical with all politicians. For good reason.If we do not prepare ourselves to go into a fresh election with well thought out policies then we will not win back their trust. If we cannot explain those policies clearly and easily to ordinary people who don't have politics as their hobby then we will not win the arguments. If we have not done the basic groundwork of trying to connect properly with ordinary people in local communities up and down the country then they are unlikely to trust us. The nasty right are busily taking the opportunity to persuade a very dangerous number of people that the real answer to their problems is to get rid of all those pesky immigrants. We have to take their threat seriously and do the real work that is necessary to convince people that there is a much more constructive way forward. Or we will lose. I hope that particular prediction is alarmist nonsense. But then again we live in a world where people take Donald Trump seriously and I never predicted that!

​Let's be honest. Reforming welfare isn't easy. Every individual's circumstances are different and there are a whole series of complex and confusing measures in place to try to make sure that those who need help get it and those who don't can't work the system. Few people understand the way that benefits and tax relief work together. In any one year a person could be a potential recipient of housing benefit, tax credits, disability payments, unemployment benefits, child benefits and a whole series of other potential forms of help.Experts who have studied the system for years get the interactions wrong yet we expect the ordinary claimant - who may have low levels of literacy and numeracy - to find their way through the labyrinth. That is one of the reasons why there has been increasing enthusiasm in recent years from both right and left for simplification. Many on the left like the idea of the citizens income. Many on the right want to cut benefits by combining them - as Iain Duncan Smith was famously trying to do with his Welfare to Work initiative before the cuts went beyond what even he could stomach.In theory simplifying sounds very attractive. Why not get rid of all that pesky complexity?I think many of these efforts are doomed to failure because of one simple truth. People are complex things and their circumstances do vary. Over simplify and you are quite likely to end up with some very nasty unintended consequences.For example, if you pay a flat rate citizens' income to everyone then you will be making welfare payments to the children of some of the richest people in the country. You will also be paying people equally regardless of what disability they have, what the cost of their housing is, how many children they have, whether they are a single parent, and whether or not they are too sick to work. If you start to complicate the system by introducing supplements to citizens income to take account of these things then you are back to a means tested system. So either you introduce very generous arrangements for the healthy and wealthy using money that could have gone to the needy or you pretend to have a simple citizens income but vary it according to need. The moment you start trying to deal with real people's varying needs you go straight back into some form of means testing. Which I happen to think is a lot more realistic as a way of getting money to the right people than a flat payment.There is, however, another way of approaching reform of tax and welfare. You could combine income tax with all welfare payments. Why not openly admit that it makes sense to assess people's needs but do it once? One government agency could assess every aspect of the needs of individuals and determine what tax or benefits they should receive accordingly. Get people to fill out one tax and benefit assessment and then ensure that the needs of the individual are met and decide how much they can contribute to society. By doing it this way you can avoid hidden problems for families like suddenly losing a significant benefit when family income rises. It becomes much easier to ensure that there is always a reasonable incentive for working.There are huge advantages to such an arrangement. The individual would no longer have to be subject to constantly filling out forms and being assessed by different government agencies trying to find out whether they were in need of different forms of support. Instead the one tax and benefit agency could request all relevant information and put together information about your housing needs, your disability, your childcare, your school uniform costs and so on. The saving in terms of government bureaucracy would be enormous and if those savings were used sensibly you could replace unconnected staff in different agencies that are currently hurriedly looking at the same information about the same person with a single client manager who would have sufficient time to look properly into the circumstances of each individual. The official could develop a proper knowledge of the situation in which their client lives. All individuals, whether rich or poor, would need to develop a relationship with the tax and benefits office and the same would be true in reverse.From the citizens point of view you would have one government department to ring and talk to whenever your circumstances changed. Easy to understand. Easy to deal with. From the government's point of view there would be one official looking into the circumstances of each individual and developing a relationship with them. Easy to administer and much easier to detect tax avoidance or benefit fraud because someone would have the whole picture and the time and the knowledge to examine anything that looked suspicious.Devising the rules for such a system would of course be a serious challenge but in essence involves codifying current rules and making them clearer and simpler. It also has to be admitted that whenever you simplify the system there is always someone who wins out and someone else who loses and those who lose could be placed in difficulty. The way to overcome this is to phase in a new system by applying it to new claimants. This would also enable the new system to be tested and refined with relatively small numbers of people at first so that any errors could be ironed out.We have just been given a huge lesson by Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne in the difficulties of trying to combine and simplify 6 benefits at the same time as cutting them. They were wrong to think this would be simple, wrong to rush to implement it without listening sufficiently to criticisms, wrong to try to use this reform to cut down on payments to the poorest people in our society and wrong to blame the poor for needing help. This does not mean that they were wrong in thinking that the current system has become so complex and unwieldy that it is no longer helping people as effectively as it could and that it is costing a fortune to administer and needs change.If we really want to target money to where it is needed and to simplify arrangements why not consider phasing in a single tax and benefit system administered by one Department?

​It is a common mistake to assume that politicians are solely interested in their own career and don't really believe the things that they say. Most of them chose to go into politics because they sincerely believed that they have the answers to our problems and the world would be a much better place if folks just listened to them a bit more often. That is what usually makes them so dangerous. Hitler and Stalin and the vast majority of their murderers sincerely believed they were helping humanity as the death tolls in the camps and from the wars mounted up. Someone riddled with self doubt would never have been capable of such cruelty.A degree of cynicism about yourself and your own self importance is a very healthy thing. So is a lot of questioning and doubts about the orthodoxy of the party you have chosen to belong to. For example, the Green Party, which I belong to, is committed to establishing a citizens' income. I think there is a real risk that it would prove every bit as crude and inoperable in practice as Iain Duncan Smith's Universal Credit. Efforts to simplify the benefit system often have very unpleasant impacts in practice. Means testing and complexity are there for a reason. The world is complex and generally speaking it is a very good idea to look carefully at what means of support someone has if you want to target help to the most needy. I don't fancy paying a citizens income to the son of a multi- millionaire living in the family mansion and denying enough to a single mother at risk of living on the streets of London.When it comes to understanding the complexities of the benefits system I suspect Iain Duncan Smith might be able to teach us all quite a lot about starting out believing it is all very simple and needs a radical overhaul by someone with vision. The key question of the past week is can he also teach us anything about honesty in politics?Let's start with the most charitable and logical theory. Assume that he believes everything he said on the Andrew Marr show and in his letter to David Cameron. He said clearly and powerfully that the government has made the wrong ideological choice about imposing austerity, that we aren't all in it together and that you can't target tax cuts at the rich in budget after budget at the same time as trying to take money away from people who happen to have a serious disability at this point in time. He added that it is narrow minded ideological obsession to refuse to undertake investment and that policies are imposing severe burdens on young people of working age.To me that sounds like a pretty reasonable summary of the key mistakes of current government policy. So why not believe him when he says that he has been battling against these ideas quietly from the inside for ages and the pressures of defending the indefensible have just become too much?The alternative theory also has a lot going for it. There does seem to be a distinct possibility that this is more about the career and the self interest of IDS than it is about his searing long term commitment to shifting the burden of cuts from the poor to the rich. His possible motives include:1. Resigning over this issue made it virtually impossible for Osborne to become the next Prime Minister. It is just remotely possible that jealousy and rivalry might have been a more powerful motivation than concern for the welfare of the poor.

2. He was pressured by the Treasury for weeks to find more cuts and warned the Treasury they would be hugely unpopular but was ignored. As soon as they were announced it became clear just how unpopular they really were. Instead of saying sorry to IDS and rallying to his defence there was an immediate effort to put all the blame for those cuts onto him and to brief against him. When this happened it was clear that he was viewed as expendable. He could either sit around and wait to be sacked and carry all the reputational blame or he could fight back. It is just remotely possible that this was about thwarted career not principle.3. IDS is a keen supporter of exit. There are a lot of poor people who vote and their votes on exit are very hard to predict. If a major exit campaigner is cutting their benefits it doesn't help the cause. If that major campaigner can magically transform himself into a champion of the poor then it has got to be good for switching a few votes. It has also got to be good for the career of that champion if Brexit wins. If his side wins the referendum he is highly likely to be back and in a powerful position. If they lose he was out on his ear anyway. It is just remotely possible that quitting now was the best way of promoting his own self interest.4. The Conservative junior Ministers who worked with IDS have been queuing up to scratch their heads in public and say that he never showed any signs of this new found commitment to the poor in private. It is very hard to read Ross Altmann's description of his bullying behaviour and still believe that IDS is primarily driven by his deep commitment to social justice. It is just remotely possible that those who worked closely with him knew him quite well.Whatever the truth of it the resignation raises serious questions about Cameron's method of governing. If you believe IDS was making sincere and heartfelt criticism then someone who has been right at the heart of the Conservative Party has been forced to the inescapable conclusion that it has formed a narrowly ideological government that is protecting the rich whilst harming the poor and is obsessed by a flawed vision of how to escape from austerity. If you think he is a cynical self serving politician then Cameron has been employing a deeply unpleasant character to do his dirty work for a very long time.Either way the Conservative Party is now in trouble. There are another three months of campaigning to go before we get to the vote on Brexit. As the referendum approaches the divisions are not going to weaken - they are going to get sharper and more difficult. The divide in the Conservative Party over Europe is one of fundamental ideological difference. One wing of the party wants what is in the best interests of British industry and commerce - which is unquestionably to stay inside the biggest trading network and not take silly risks with our major market. The other side thinks we can't possibly be great again without getting out and getting the nation free from all those pesky regulations about workers rights, women's rights and the environment and closing the door on nasty foreigners.These are not views of the world that can be reconciled. The divisions in the Conservative Party are not ones that can be healed easily the day after the referendum vote. It is hard to see who could step forward and unite that party after three months more of vicious infighting. It is not hard to see how it could split. If a significant number of members of the Conservative Party sincerely believe that they have the right answers to our country's problems and the other side of the party is dangerously wrong then there is more reason to expect a split than business as usual. We are in for some interesting times!

One of the most interesting things about the budget is how much it reveals about the way George Osborne views the world. He doesn't know many ordinary people and it shows. He knows even less about the lives of ordinary young people.So he was proud to announce a new scheme to help struggling young people. He will do this by allowing them to save £20,000 each year before they have to pay any tax on their savings. Clearly he thinks that is the sort of thing that it is fairly normal for a young person to be able to do. It would be extraordinary in the extreme if any young person without the assistance of a wealthy family could manage to save that amount from their wages.For a start the majority of young people don't actually get paid £20,000 a year. If they do then they are probably part of the slightly less than 50% of the young population who possess a degree. If they studied for their degree without parental financial help then they are likely to be £27,000 in debt for their course fees plus whatever they have had to pay for their accommodation. A debt of over £40,000 would be quite normal. George did nothing to help them lower this debt. Instead he gave a tax break in the belief that they would be happily saving money and worrying about whether they might be putting away more or less than £20,000 each year!Then he revealed an equal lack of understanding about how a young person acquires a home these days. Apparently he still believes they are all queuing up to buy and all they need is a little bit of assistance to put their deposit together and buy one of those affordable homes his developers will be building. So if a young person can save £4,000 a year the chancellor will give them another £1,000. Leave aside for a minute the unfairness that those who don't earn enough to save this get nothing whilst their richer friends do. Leave aside also the fact that if this works to help young people to be able to afford to buy then it will raise demand without shifting supply and so simply put up the cost of homes at taxpayers' expense. Consider instead the reality that 'affordable' family homes come in around £200,000 a year near me. In London it is £450,000. Ordinary young people who don't have help from their family simply cannot earn enough to service a debt like this on top of any student loan payments. The problem isn't just the deposit.The vast majority of young people aren't sitting around asking themselves how many months it will be until they can buy their first home thanks to the Chancellor. They are renting on short term tenancies and worrying about whether their landlord will evict them after six months and how much they will have to pay to the letting agency to be allowed to get somewhere new. Many private landlords are, of course, thoroughly responsible. Not all of them are, with the consequence that insecurity about your home is a fact of life for many young people.The idea of a home owner democracy where ordinary people get their own home out of their own efforts is a highly attractive one. Unfortunately the very people who profess to believe most strongly in it have made it a thing of the past. The rate of home ownership amongst the young has dropped by half. Renting is now the norm and it is not renting from a well intentioned council or a charitable housing association. The possibility of either of those two options has also become remote. Yet more council homes are being sold off and the Conservatives are trying hard to bully Housing Associations into agreeing to do the same after discovering that the government couldn't simply seize their properties by force as they had first intended.It was therefore revealing that there was not a word in the budget about increasing the supply of rental properties or increasing the security of tenants who have to bring up their families living in them. There was a promise of tax cuts for the low paid.This was also revealing. Osborne clearly believes that the biggest problem poor people have when their income goes up is that they lose some of that money in tax. It isn't. The biggest problem they face is that they lose so much money in benefits that they can often encounter losses equivalent to over 80% of their income. If he can think back far enough to the last budget then he might remember that he completely underestimated the scale of this problem with tax credits. Instead of learning the lesson he has repeated the mistake. If his aim was to help low paid tax payers he should have properly investigated the best way to mix tax and benefits instead of going for a simplistic measure that does little for the poor but gives every other tax payer a boost.It is interesting to compare Osborne's serious lack of knowledge of the way the lives of ordinary people actually work with the degree of understanding he shows of the lives of those rather better off. He has looked after them quite effectively. You can earn more money before you pay the 40% rate of tax. You can avoid paying capital gains tax on more of your profits from the stock market. And you can collect dividends on your shares without the company you own paying quite so much in corporation tax. That will do very nicely I am sure.Provided that you move in the same circles as George.

​I have always been suspicious of people who believe that everything their opponents say is rubbish and everything that people on their own 'side' say must be true. I don't think this is a very convincing approach. Since the rich and powerful control most of the messages in the media one of the few weapons the poor and powerless have available to them has to be the ability to tell it like it is with ruthless honesty. We lose any ability to do that when we fall into the trap of believing our own propaganda and refusing to believe anything others say.So let's be honest about Osborne's budget. Not all of it is wrongheaded. It's just a bit of a shame that the main thrust of it is driven by a deeply flawed ideology that was proven to be a complete failure during the economic collapse of 2008. It simply isn't true that the free market is always the best way to get things done. Sometimes it is the best way to wreck the entire system in a huge banking collapse. Nor is it true that there isn't enough money around and austerity must be imposed. The Bank of England has created £375 billion of free money since 2008 and pumped it into the economy to stave off the worst excesses of austerity. That is why the economy grew before the election. If we want it to carry on growing it would be very simple to ask the Bank of England to do this again but this time to use that money more wisely. Say on investment in reducing energy consumption. Most of all it isn't true that the best way to save the economy is to make sure that the national budget is in surplus every year on both the current account and the investment account. This is in fact the best way to drive the economy onto a slower growth trajectory and thus increase government costs whilst lowering its revenues and make the deficit worse. But let's resist the temptation to dwell on those tiny little negatives. Let's start on the positives. There really is a need to rebalance the economy away from London and create a series of regional powerhouses and the north is a perfectly good place to start. Investment per head in infrastructure in London massively exceeds investment in the provinces and the differential goes way beyond any increased costs of building in a large successful city. If we can get proper investment in transport links across a genuine northern powerhouse then it will ease pressure on housing costs in London, cut costs and increase competitiveness for UK business, increase work opportunities and boost prosperity in the regions and make the economy more sustainable.Regional policy makes sense and rail transport links really are an important part of this. It is therefore very encouraging that Osborne has said time and again that he understands this and is determined to invest in a northern powerhouse. So credit when it is due. He is saying the right things.Unfortunately when it comes to doing anything he is letting us down. What he is actually going to do is to put £300 million into funding a study into the possibility of starting the northern powerhouse sometime around 2020 and finishing it in the 2030s. He won't put any serious new money into real actual construction work on the northern powerhouse that starts happening right now. Instead he has told us that there will be billions invested at some point in the future. Provided, of course, that every Chancellor between now and then decides that this is a sensible investment and sees it through with determination and genuine money.This is not a promise that has inspired anyone who has looked in detail at the implications. Nick Fallon the leader of the Liberal Democrats described it as fantasy investment on a fantasy powerhouse. Judith Blake, the Leader of Leeds City Council was equally unimpressed. She has claimed that over recent years the investment in rail infrastructure in London stood at 13 times as much per head as investment in Yorkshire and the Humber. Crossrail alone cost £14.2 billion and is close to completion. Whilst this excellent and very welcome project was underway the north has not was experiencing steady deterioration in the lines and the rolling stock year on year. This is the definition of serious disinvestment not a launch pad for an economic revival.It would be very easy for the Chancellor to make a big difference in quite a short timescale by putting relatively small amounts on investment into improving the quality of local lines and linking them up more coherently. He is being constrained from doing so by an ideological straight jacket which tells him that he cannot undertake public investment without making budget cuts somewhere else.This is a deeply flawed view of how to go about making sensible investments. A time of low interest rates and low inflation is the ideal moment for major infrastructure investments. When an economy is starting to slow the imperative is even stronger. Some of the investment could safely be paid for via a more constructive use of Quantitative Easing without incurring a single penny of extra debt. But Osborne's ideology of austerity won't let him do that. If that is too radical for him then he could follow the advice of almost every conventional economist and allow himself to pay for constructive long term investment via increased government borrowing at cheap long term interest rates. Once again his ideology forbids common sense practical action. If he really wants a powerful coherent transport hub across the north he could get the best value out of any investment by creating a single coherent transport authority for the north owning the entire rail service and providing a London transport style single ticketing system. But that would smack of nationalisation & so is beyond his vision.This is a Chancellor who has quite correctly recognised that there is a very serious problem in the real world and then analysed it through the prism of an ideology which hasn't even begun to understand what happened to the economy in 2008. We may get investment. But it will come at the price of massive cuts in spending elsewhere. We may get new transport links. But the utter confusion of the rail service will be increased by selling each station off to separate private buyers. And we may eventually get increased prosperity for people in the north. Provided they don't mind taking out private insurance to cover themselves against any misfortune and discovering their schools have been raided to send cash down south and the doctors have left their local hospital to rot in its own deficit.As I say, I think it is important to be balanced and only criticise the Chancellor for what he has actually got wrong!

Imagine for a second who could be running some of the largest economies in the world in a few short month's time if everything goes very badly. Let's start with the USA. Under the leadership of Donald Trump and busy building a wall and scrapping income tax along with most of the things it pays for. Then assume that Britain has voted out of the EU and Cameron has been replaced by Gove or Johnson with Farage nipping at their heels saying that he was the farsighted person who knew it all first. The pressure is on for all those pesky workers' rights, women's rights and environmental policies to be dumped as quickly as possible.Then look across the channel and imagine the governance of France after an election in which the social democrats get wiped out and the Front National takes its share of the vote upwards from the 34% vote share it achieved in recent local elections. Next add in the distinct possibility of a German government dragged to the right by a resurgence of extremism in its local elections and an electorate that has decided to punish Merkel for trying to behave decently towards desperate refugees.What kind of world would we be living in if this entirely possible version of reality worked out?Worrying isn't it? Fortunately this alarmist vision doesn't have to be true. Elections can produce horrible results and it is all too easy for populist politicians backed by a great deal of money to convince people to adopt policies that take us into some very dark and dangerous places. They can also produce very positive results.Some folk on the left are highly critical of liberal democracies and want us to believe that the entire system is a corrupt fix and that we are entirely at the mercy of a plutocracy who control what we think and do absolutely. They don't. They can control the old fashioned mass media but they cannot control what any of us will do when we get into the ballot box and, with the growth of social media, they are starting to find it a lot harder to control what people hear. The ability to say and hear what you want and the ability to stand in elections and vote freely for who you want are important freedoms.Ordinary Democratic voters are free to vote for Saunders instead of Clinton and by doing so in impressive numbers they are changing the nature of what it is permissible for serious politicians to support in the States. His mass support will have an impact on what Clinton does even if he loses. Equally the mass of American voters have every opportunity to vote down Trump and demonstrate that his loud mouthed approach is out of synch with the vast majority of the population. By sending him to a crushing defeat they would be delivering a huge message to all American politicians and to many in the UK. This kind of politics plays well to a small number of highly active and very unpleasant people but it doesn't work with the vast bulk of folk.A defeat for Trump would be a huge defeat for the whole of the American right. The ability to deliver that defeat still resides with the US voters, just as the ability to deliver our own defeat to a lurch to the right lies with UK and European voters. The vote wasn't given to people as a free gift from the rich and powerful to try and fool them. It was fought for and demanded by ordinary men and women against huge resistance because they knew that it put them in control. Indeed the rich have never quite got used to the idea that poor people can actually control them once in a while. That's why it was made so difficult for them to register to vote in the States and why the Conservatives in the UK are trying to copy this by taking a lot of poor people off the electoral register.Democracy isn't a thing to be despised. It is something to be celebrated. When someone on the left tries to persuade people that they should be cynical about it and refuse to vote they are simply increasing the sense of powerlessness of working people. When they make sure everyone is registered and determined to exercise the power that the vote gives them then they are helping to consolidate a victory that was hard won by our predecessors.I am the first to admit that people have been turned off from voting by some very bad experiences of untrustworthy politicians. Tony Blair's assertion that we should trust him because he had seen evidence of weapons of mass destruction that meant we had to go to war would be top of my list. Closely followed by George Brown's claim to have put an end to boom and bust just as he allowed the bankers to push us into the biggest bust ever.But the nature of struggle is that you have to keep fighting. If you don't push forward then opponents will push you back. In any given situation there is always a way to improve it a little, and sometimes a lot. There are also always ways for it to be made worse. All the best struggles were won by people who refused to be intimidated by hugely powerful forces of the establishment and who took on the odds and won.It seems to me that in a very short period of time we could be living under the rule of some very scary people. At the very least we are going to have to get used to doing politics in a time when extreme right wing politicians and their nasty supporters are a significant force. We can't beat them by trying to persuade the public that they are essentially correct but a little too extreme. We can defeat them and the centre ground austerity politicians by using the freedoms we have got effectively to put forward policies that genuinely are in the interest of ordinary people. We can defeat the right by being effective and honest and sticking to our principles when working for the public in elected office locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.In case this sounds like a weak liberal point of view I would remind you that Lenin insisted the Bolsheviks stood for the Tsarist Duma even when the elections were utterly stacked against him. And the Anarchists stood for office and entered the government during the Spanish Civil War!

​It is fascinating to discover that the European Central Bank is cutting very short term interest rates to minus 0.4% and printing an extra 20 billion Euros a month. They are now busy creating 80 billion extra money every month out of thin air and using it to buy long term assets that are stuck on bank's balance sheets. The theory is that the banks will use the cash to go out and lend and the economy will get moving again.Rarely has there been such a sad case of ideological conviction preventing intelligent people from staring the evidence in the face. In good times when there is lots of demand from business people willing to invest and then putting lots of highly liquid money into the banks will cause an economy to roar ahead. The banks will be falling over themselves to lend to businesses and those businesses will be able to employ lots of extra people so there will be a direct and immediate impact on the real economy. Indeed if any central bank was mad enough to print money like this during a boom it would have the sole impact of causing a horrible problem with inflation.But we aren't living in a time of boom. We are living in the post 2008 world of severe economic crisis. Print money during a recession and there is a nasty tendency to push on a piece of string. You can supply as much money as you like. If banks don't trust businesses to pay back they won't lend to them. If banks are worried that they might need access to cash quickly because the stock market and oil prices are wildly fluctuating and there might be another crash then once again they won't lend.Of course nothing is as simple or as absolute as this. You can't create that amount of money without doing something significant to boost the economy. When the US government decided to print $3,000,000,000,000 in quantitative easing it did have a positive impact. It stopped the banking crash dead in its tracks and the US economy moved from losing 400,000 jobs a month at the end of the Bush Presidency to having one of the lowest and most rapidly falling unemployment rates in the Western world towards the end of Obama's. When the Bank of England printed £375,000,000,000 in QE it counteracted enough of the Conservative party's austerity cuts to put the British economy onto around 2% growth for several years and won the Conservatives a reputation for rescuing the economy and the election.In both of those cases little of the money went into fundamental transformation of the real economy, useful investment or even decent secure living standards for ordinary people. It went into a property boom. It went into a share price boom which then collapsed. It went to banks who then turned round to the governments that had rescued them and refused to reform adequately. As a result it went by without doing anything to alleviate austerity for ordinary people. Indeed it produce a very strange phenomena. The US and UK economies grew rapidly and looked successful on a statistical basis at the same time as the citizens of both countries found that their standards of living and the services they depended upon both went downhill. Ordinary people got nothing out of QE except for the avoidance of total system collapse. The banks survived, the city got back to prosperity but it is still a matter of very hard times indeed for ordinary working people and for ordinary businesses.Therein lies the tragedy. All that lovely QE money and at the same time a horrible atmosphere of cuts and more cuts. Banks helped again and again to survive by central bankers desperately determined to keep the system alive. Ordinary people made to cut back again and again by governments determined to balance books. Books which had only fallen into deficit because of the collapse of those banks caused a downturn that generated 8 years of government revenue shortfalls. Banks were helped to rebuild their balance sheets. Companies - with the sole exception of the US car giant - were told it is a sin for government to help rebuild theirs. Ordinary people told they must balance their budgets and government telling us they must always do the same whilst we all watch free money flow out of the central banks into the hands of the investment bankers who caused the problems in the first place. No wonder voters are cross.The lesson anyone normal would learn from all this is one that was taught as standard economics for over 40 years under the inspiration of John Maynard Keynes. In a recession you need to print money to get things moving and the best thing to do with it is to invest it wisely in transforming your economy. No amount of pumping money into the system via the banks will work if the banks are scared to lend. The state has to invest directly itself.The only thing which has held the US and the UK back from doing this direct useful investment of QE money is ideology. They think it is morally wrong to use the ability of the government to print money in order for the government to invest that money. Apparently they think it will cause inflation.Inflation is hovering around zero in the UK. We are not at risk of hyperinflation. There is, on the contrary, a very real risk of entering a period of nasty deflation. The politicians and economists of the early 1970s almost created a horrible problem of hyperinflation because they failed to see the signals until it was very late in the day. They had been trained by people who lived through the Great Depression and were fighting the wrong battle. The politicians and the economists of the last 8 years are in severe danger of giving us decades of economic misery because they are also fighting the wrong battle with the wrong weapons. What we need now, is to fight off stagnation and to adapt to a rapidly changing world economy that needs internationally managing. Trusting banks to do the right thing with billions of free money when they drove themselves to destruction using their own resources is not likely to be a very good way forward. It is also a strange idea of morality that gives free money to them and then decides that government is so poor that it can't invest.The ECB has therefore got it half right. In a time of stagnation it really is necessary to create money out of thin air to get the economy moving and to help the 25% of people in Spain and Greece who are unemployed and the millions of others across the continent who are desperately worried about how they are going to earn a living and pay their bills. But they need to use this money wisely for long term transformation of the economy.We need to move to low energy, low consumption economy in which 8 billion people across the world are able to live well, work and consume without wrecking the planet. We need to transform our economies onto a much more secure and stable basis and make our companies efficient in the new environment that the world economy has to operate in if it is to survive. We have a wonderful opportunity to make serious inroads on this task by using the billions that are gaily being created by central banks across the Western world. Why aren't we using Quantitative Easing resources to make this transformation instead of frittering it away on the financial markets in yet another unpredictable boom and bust?Could it be that our leaders are constrained by following dated ideas that don't work in the new era?

​One of the early themes to emerge in the EU debate is that those who wish to leave the EU want to portray anyone who wants to remain in as part of 'project fear'. Apparently a vote for an exit is a vote for hope. I would put it slightly differently. Those who want to get out seem to be on the side of hit and hope. They are indulging in wishful thinking and the rest of us are simply asking the obvious hard questions. These are some of them:1. What will be the tariffs on British goods after an exit?2.How much more would we have to pay for EU goods because of new UK tariffs?3. Why would EU countries let us sell to their market of 550 million customers on equal terms if we don't follow the EU rules? Surely this would disadvantage their own companies and be rejected.4. Why would we get any say over EU rules & regulations after we leave?5. How do we replace our biggest foreign market if there is any decline in sales to the EU? Why would we suddenly start selling more to the rest of the world? What is the mechanism that makes that happen in reality?6. How many London jobs depend on financial services industries and how many of those jobs would migrate to the rival centre of Frankfurt?7. How many Sunderland jobs depend on the car industry and how many foreign owned companies would move business inside the new EU borders to be certain of tariff free trading long term?8. What will happen to UK farming after an exit?9. What happens to the EU after we leave? Is there any risk of it breaking up and do we go back to a Europe of tiny states that fought two world wars? How has NATO helped to keep the peace between France, Germany and the UK? 10. What will the Brexit camp want to do the morning after an exit? Will they be itching to strengthen workers rights, maternity leave, health and safety at work, animal rights, environmental protection, investment in green energy and the human rights act?11. What will happen to Scotland? What will prevent the break-up of the UK? How will the Scottish border be policed? Will their example be followed by Northern Ireland? Or Wales?Most people on the streets are complaining that they can't seem to get the facts about the impact of a Brexit and so can't yet make up their minds. The truth is that none of us can give them a factual answer to most questions. Both sides are speculating because no one can know the answers. Each side can tell you what they want to be true but the only fact is that there is huge uncontrollable uncertainty.It is entirely possible that we will split from our partners in an entirely reasonable way after a series of friendly and helpful negotiations where all sides follow rational long term decision making processes and downplay their own short term self interest. Anyone who has ever split from a partner whether in business or in love will have their doubts about this. Divorce tends to come with a hefty price bill.Of course sometimes a painful divorce is worth it because we emerge at the end of the process stronger and happier and glad that we put up with a bit of pain. I am sure that everyone will be re-assured by that thought as they contemplate the prospect of waking up in June to find themselves in bed with Nigel Farage, Ian Duncan Smith and Berndard Ingham. They may also be inspired by hope as they hear that we can now look forward to a secure future because we can control our borders and shut out all those pesky foreigners who have been causing all our problems. Personally I think the world might just be a little more complex and I am not too sure that I view the empowerment of UKIP and its friends as a very hopeful prospect!Sometimes fear is a very rational and sensible emotion.